Big Brother and Silicon Valley

The word “HACK” is painted across the main square of Facebook’s campus in letters so large that they can be seen from space. The term has lost its negative connotation in Silicon Valley; freewheeling coding sessions and virtual breaking and entering have become the same thing. The culture of hacking is rebellious, idealistic, and militantly anti-bureaucratic—fitting for an age that glorifies entrepreneurship—and it marks a stark shift from the recent history of scientists in American life. During the heyday of the space program, rocket scientists and computer engineers worked closely with NASA officials. The bureaucrat and the geek were not polar opposites but complementary types who often seemed indistinguishable—straight arrows with an occasional streak of repressed weirdness. But, with the counterculture and the advent of the personal computer as a tool for individual liberation, John Glenn gave way to Steve Jobs, “Apollo 13” to “The Social Network.”

Now the National Security Agency’s data-mining story has fundamentally changed the public’s picture of Silicon Valley and its relation to the state. As I wrote in the magazine last month (now available online to non-subscribers), the Valley has, historically, kept as far away from Washington as possible. A strong, though not particularly ideological, strain of libertarianism appears to be coded into the DNA of computer engineers—a desire to be left alone to create beautiful systems that can be messed up only by the uncomprehending interference of mediocrities from the government. Partly as a result, information technology has been one of the country’s most lightly regulated industries. Last year, when Congress was poised to pass laws intended to protect intellectual property and prevent online piracy, tech companies, led by Google, struck back with one of the most effective lobbying tactics ever used: they shut down for a day. The effect was instantaneous—both bills went from easy sailing to overwhelming defeat. So much for that regulatory effort.

But the opposition between tech and government has been breaking down recently, and in ways not limited to the N.S.A. program. Silicon Valley was always aware of the downsides to a relationship with Washington, but now it knows more about potential positives, not just in the growing influence of tech money in political campaigns and tech endorsements of individual candidates but in industry-led advocacy efforts on issues like immigration reform, and in the idea of technology as a solution for chronic social problems. Now, it turns out, the biggest companies in the computer business—Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple, among others—have been giving vast amounts of user data to the government’s chief surveillance agency, in some cases for years. (The Washington Post obtained an N.S.A. document claiming that the government has access to the companies’ servers. The companies, using nearly identical legal language, deny it. Perhaps we’ll know more in the coming days.)

Is it really surprising that the brotherhood of hackers turns out to be more like central intelligence? It doesn’t take much of an imaginative leap to go from gathering every last move you make online, and sharing it with marketers and advertisers, to divulging it to spies. Google, Apple, and Facebook have long since stopped being mere instruments of individual empowerment through collecting and processing information. Benignly democratic terms like “open source” and “transparency”—still in ubiquitous use around Silicon Valley—have become outmoded distractions from the source of the tech giants’ phenomenal growth, which is data-mining and its monetization.

Yes, it’s voluntary—no one forces you to enter credit-card information on Home Depot’s Web site, or to let Facebook track every purchase you make on Amazon—whereas Prism, the N.S.A.’s top-secret program for mining e-mails, videos, chats, and other online communications, is not. Markets involve choice; laws do not. Being a consumer is discretionary; being a citizen isn’t. But Prism, for all its breathtaking reach and intrusiveness, is less creepy to me than all the trillions of bits of information that commercial companies have stored up on all of us, gathered through a sophisticated mix of temptations, deceptions, default settings, carelessness, and sheer market power. It’s sinister when Big Brother is watching you, but it’s even more sinister when Big Brother is you, sharing. Prism is designed to prevent terror attacks on Americans. Advertising algorithms are designed to increase Google’s and Facebook’s profits. Which involves more of a public benefit? Between career officials at the N.S.A. and marketing managers at social-media companies, I trust the former more than the latter to maintain my privacy and use the information they have on me with maximum restraint. (Private contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton are a different story—the outsourcing of national security is one of the worst post-9/11 trends.)

I’m sympathetic to the dilemma of technology companies that are faced with government requests for access to information. There is an interest in protecting their users’ privacy (or whatever is left of it), and there is an interest in protecting Americans from attack. The government hasn’t proved that the full breadth of the N.S.A.’s program is necessary to uncover, track, and stop terror plots. Its critics haven’t proved that the program has been abused, that the collection of so much abstract data has led to unwarranted specific intrusions. What the whole debate obviously needs is much more clarity—for the government to allow more daylight into the nature of its surveillance programs (its fanatical level of secrecy is at least partly self-serving and designed to thwart critics as much as terrorists), and for the companies to be allowed to stop lying about their involvement. If we are going to have an N.S.A. with such broad powers of surveillance, and a technology industry with such extensive involvement in that surveillance, both have to be monitored and regulated (a hated word in the Valley) much more heavily than they are. Members of the congressional intelligence committees need to be able to discuss what they know without resorting to elaborate circumlocutions, and White House officials need to try persuasion instead of mere assertion. Courts need to be able to reach decisions that are accountable to parties other than just the government itself. Reporters need to be able to dig up important stories—as long as they don’t put lives at risk—without fear of the Justice Department. Technology executives need to be able to describe their industry’s participation in language that’s at least translucent, if not transparent. And the public needs to be able to understand, and then judge, this latest manifestation of the ancient trade-off between liberty and security.

Perhaps it’s a sign of Silicon Valley’s maturation that its knee-jerk response to Prism was not to tell the government to stay out. The technology industry has responsibilities to entities other than just its own products. The day of the hacker is long gone—and now there can be no illusions.